The fall of Salon.com | Hacker News Reader

The fall of Salon.com

politico.com

40 pointsmorgante11 comments

Politico reporting on Salon hoping for it's downfall... isn't that the journalistic equivalent of dividing by zero without the Gawker constant (sqrt -1) in the equation?

To me Joan Walsh is the biggest culprit. Under her the PC cleansing began, first with Charlie Tayler, then Stephanie Zacharek and many more. Gleen Greenwald left, and there was nothing interesting anymore.

Used to read salon, slate, and national review regularly.

As I became more disgusted in politics, and it began dumbing itself down (fox/msnbc/facebook) more and more over the years, I no longer look at them. Seems to be a waste of time, like watching a soap opera, with very little to learn.

Do you think those publications became dumbed down, or did you come to understand their viewpoints thoroughly enough that you no longer found them stimulating?

Really good question, but I suspect both are happening.

Especially the Alternet pieces on Salon are just... what they are - effectively low-grade propaganda.

There used to be intelligent writers, but these things seem to be mainly preaching to the choir, of questionable provenance and least common denominator.

"fall" implies they had credibility to begin with. I don't recall that ever being the case, honestly. How long ago was that?

Salon is really where digital journalism goes to die. The level of dishonesty displayed is really outrageous [1].

[1]: https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-int...

Wow. Yikes. The deleted text is very significant.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Continue down the rabbit hole if you want to see how dishonest and malicious Islam apologists like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are. Flabbergasting.

Strange they would censor that when the Salon piece that Harris is butt-hurt about is quite well argued. They could've just run his comments and allowed the writer to respond.

On another note reading that interview TIL that Harris is only a few degrees removed from the more rabid Islamaphobes. He certainly builds on the amateur dialectic of assuming that everything wrong with the Muslim world comes from the Quran and Sunnah rather than a flawed jurisprudential discourse amongst the ulema that offers vast possibilities for improvement.

"but if you had stood at the gates of Vienna in 1683, you could have not helped but notice the civilizational problem of jihad." Gotta love that - the West pillaged, enslaved and exploited half the world but it's some other folks that have a problem with violence. Right. Maybe if Christianity had stopped Christian nations from wars of expansion we'd have some valid basis of comparison.

Good thing Harris is just preaching to his New Atheist choir (now powered by 50% more smugness!).

I stopped reading after their horrific redesign a while back (it has since gone through some other mediocre rework). It was so hamfisted and mirrored the decay of content.

Back in the early days I read Salon regularly. It was such a huge disappointment when things went off the rails.

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